The impact of legacy vulnerabilities in today’s cybersecurity landscape

The digital revolution has irrevocably transformed how we live, work, and interact – and has driven data protection and cybersecurity to the forefront of business concern. With this interconnectedness comes an increasingly large attack surface for malicious actors to target. The temptation for businesses looking to combat these threats is to focus resources, effort and attention to the headlines related to the ‘unknown’ – AI, novel, zero-day cyber threats that haven’t yet been extensively studied or successfully combated in the wild.

Naturally, for many security teams, identifying and mitigating against these threats, particularly in the era of AI, will take an absolute priority, with concern about the scale of financial damage and operational impact they can cause. However, for small to medium businesses (SMBs), the exploitation of known vulnerabilities – sometimes ones that are several years old – still represents a key cybersecurity challenge. In short, vulnerabilities are weaknesses in systems, applications, processes, and even human behavior that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access, steal sensitive data, or disrupt operations.